Reflections on culture and ideas by author and illustrator Christopher Taylor

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Tuesday, November 24, 2015

CRYBULLIES: WEAPONIZED VICTIMHOOD

"The freedom to offend the powerful is not equivalent to the freedom to bully the relatively disempowered."

There's a new sort of protest in town, and its name is "Crybullying." The first place I saw that name was in The Spectator, where they described its use across America:

This is the age of the Cry-Bully, a hideous hybrid of victim and victor, weeper and walloper. They are everywhere, these duplicit Pushmi-Pullyus of the personal and the political, from Celebrity Big Brother to the frontline of Islamism. Jeremy Clarkson is a prime cry bully, punching a producer and then whining in The Sunday Times about ‘losing my baby’ (The baby being Top Gear). Perez Hilton, recently of the CBB house, is a good example too, screaming abuse at his wretched room-mates until they snapped and hit back, at which point he would dissolve in floods of tears and flee to the Diary Room to claim that he felt ‘unsafe’. Stephen Fry is one, forever banging on about his own mental fragility yet mocking Stephen Hawking’s voice at a recent awards ceremony.Crymobs will “safebait” by yelling and pushing and then whining that the people they’re shoving make them feel unsafe. One crybully safebaiting tactic is to yell loudly, forcing anyone talking back to them to raise their voice. That’s when other crybullies begin shouting, “Don’t yell at her.” Crybullies will push into you and cry that you’re making them feel unsafe. They will hit you and when you raise your hands in self-defense, they will scream that you’re putting your hands on them.

The article goes on about Social Media calling for enemies to be attacked and their homes publicized, then whining when people respond negatively, or Muslims hacking heads off then whining about Islamophobia.

But there is a new and particularly virulent sort displayed by the modern college student protester, as shown in several very recent incidents. One such example is Dartmouth, where "Black Lives Matter" activists went into athe Baker-Berry Library and began verbally assaulting, mocking, and swearing at white students trying to study there.

What supposedly had been a protest about changing a display in the student center turned into an all out assault, complete with racism.

Another example is University of Missouri ("Mizzou"), where students shoved, hit, and yelled at astudent journalist trying to document their "protest" then cried "don't yell at me" when he raised his voice to be heard -- almost exactly what Julie Burchill noted in the Spectator piece above. They were supposedly there to protest, but turned violent and angry at someone like mobs tend to do.

Or at University of Texas-Austin where "protesters" disrupted an Israeli Studies event, shouting slogans including "long live the intafada" (in which palestinans are called to stab and kill Israelis). The university took swift action to... apologize to the ones who disrupted the event and start an investigation into civil rights violations by the filthy Joo lovers Israeli Studies students and profs.

Crybullies are not protesting anything so much as just trying to intimidate and attack people they disagree with and do not like. They try to frame it in terms of safe spaces and being oppressed, but in the end, all this is about is silencing and destroying what you do not like. Or, as Mizzou vice president of the Missouri Students Association, Brenda Smith-Lezama puts it "I personally am tired of hearing that First Amendment rights protect students when they are creating a hostile and unsafe learning environment for myself and for other students here."

The rash of faux hate crimes wherein people stage a "hate crime" and then call attention to it, demanding action taken against their enemies, is reaching epidemic state. Its a useful tool in a college environment where the administration is as leftist and radical as the students and always willing to take strong actions against the politically incorrect, sometimes in the face of all evidence and facts.

Instead of standing against some perceived injustice, students are now starting to do injustice, against their enemies, then cry foul when someone disagrees or protests. The entire dynamic has shifted from Martin Luther King-era peaceful protests to late 60's violent riots. As I wrote about in the Common Knowledge series, the Kent State shootings were in response to over a week of arson, violence, destruction of property, and chaos on campus, spilling into town. There's even audio evidence of someone shooting at the national guardsmen before they open fire.

Apparently knowing that coverage of these antics will harm their cause, these crybullies try to ban journalists from being present at their events, such as at Mizzou above and Loyola University. "Black Lives Matter" activists at Mizzou later decided that only journalists who'd report on them supportively and positively should be allowed.

Its the same approach as people who actively try to destroy businesses that will now bow to their demands and cry victimhood in the process. Its the kind of madness in which a person claims their civil rights are being violated because a business they want to destroy won't sell them what they insist upon.

But increasingly, the radical left is moving from peaceful hippie types to violent, angry types who want to destroy and break rather than create and unite. They claim racism, but the only racism on display is by them. They claim oppression, but they're the only ones that demonstrate it. And in the end, they are everything they supposedly stand against - every tactic, every evil - in the name of being better and more right than their opponents.

Wednesday, November 18, 2015

FOR THE RECORD

Christmas time is closing in on us again. Some stores had decorations and supplies up before Halloween, and some businesses were running vaguely Christmas holiday-themed ads before Halloween as well.

The most recent information I read shows that Halloween is actually a more popular holiday than Christmas today, with kids wishing Halloween would come sooner, last longer, and be more often through the year than Christmas. I guess if you get gifts and goodies all year long, one day where you get some more doesn't mean much. At least on Halloween you get to dress up.

As usual this time of year, people try to bend the events celebrated on Christmas to their political and social ends. Even some churches are guilty of this, posting about how a homeless refugee immigrant palestinian teen mother was turned away by cruel, heartless, and greedy businessmen.

Others, who routinely mock Jesus, disregard the Bible, and hurl contempt upon Christianity still try to use this same narrative about Christmas.

So, to clarify matters, I'd like to make a statement here so that we can all understand the events better.

Mary and Joseph on the road to Bethlehem were not homeless, they had a home in Nazareth.

They were not refugees, they were not fleeing a war-torn land. They were traveling to register for the census for tax purposes.

They were not immigrants, once they had done what the government required, they were planning to go home.

They were not turned away from the Inn by greedy or selfish rich people, the inn was jam packed with other people traveling to the area for the same reason - census, taxes.

The lesson of that day was not how cruel people are and how we should take people in, but how humble the origins and birth of the King of Kings was. The story of Christmas is about Jesus Christ, not some political agenda anyone wants to shoehorn into the text or stamp upon it to prove their point.

Jesus came to earth to save us from our sins and sin-nature, to live a perfect life we could not live, and to purchase our salvation at the dearest price possible. That's the message of Christmas.

Tuesday, November 17, 2015

NOT REALLY MUSLIM

"There is no true Scotsman"

Several times on this blog in the past I've pointed out that President Barack Husein Obama is not a Christian despite claiming to be so. I do so because his claim to be Christian is absolutely not backed up with any actual Christian beliefs or doctrine. In fact, he defines sin, God, truth, and basically every other fundamental Christian doctrine differently than Christianity does. I doubt he has any religion at all, other than Obamaism, where he is the supreme being.

However, on the whole, I do not like to pontificate on other people's religion. KKK members claim to be Chistian, and while their racist, idiotic behavior defies that, they may otherwise be quite faithful. The Westboro Baptist members claim to be Christian, and perhaps at least some of them are - I do not know their hearts or the rest of their beliefs or actions. Only God does. In the end, if someone claims to be of a faith, and their beliefs and statements of faith do not conflict with their confession, I think we have to take them at their word.

Which brings us to Islam, wherein the President of the United States and many perhaps (more on this later) well-meaning leftists insist that terrorists cannot be Muslim. Every time a Muslim does something horrific, they instantly declare this to not be terrorism, or if it is, not really the act of a Muslim, no matter what they say. Yes, technically they may have been screaming "Allahu Akbar" and be a regular Mosque attendee who owns and reveres a Koran, but they're a false Muslim. That's the line, always.

And to me it seems incredibly arrogant and condescending. IS -- Islamic States -- has ISLAMIC in the name, yet somehow they're not real Muslims, according to the left. Recently a fellow named Faisal Saeed Al Mutar wrote about this phenomenon and I want to quote the facebook post in its entirety:

It must be incredibly frustrating as an Islamic terrorist not to have your views and motives taken seriously by the societies you terrorize, even after you have explicitly and repeatedly stated them. Even worse, those on the regressive left, in their endless capacity for masochism and self-loathing, have attempted to shift blame inwardly on themselves, denying the terrorists even the satisfaction of claiming responsibility.It's like a bad Monty Python sketch:"We did this because our holy texts exhort us to to do it.""No you didn't.""Wait, what? Yes we did...""No, this has nothing to do with religion. You guys are just using religion as a front for social and geopolitical reasons.""WHAT!? Did you even read our official statement? We give explicit Quranic justification. This is jihad, a holy crusade against pagans, blasphemers, and disbelievers.""No, this is definitely not a Muslim thing. You guys are not true Muslims, and you defame a great religion by saying so.""Huh!? Who are you to tell us we're not true Muslims!? Islam is literally at the core of everything we do, and we have implemented the truest most literal and honest interpretation of its founding texts. It is our very reason for being.""Nope. We created you. We installed a social and economic system that alienates and disenfranchises you, and that's why you did this. We're sorry.""What? Why are you apologizing? We just slaughtered you mercilessly in the streets. We targeted unwitting civilians - disenfranchisement doesn't even enter into it!""Listen, it's our fault. We don't blame you for feeling unwelcome and lashing out.""Seriously, stop taking credit for this! We worked really hard to pull this off, and we're not going to let you take it away from us.""No, we nourished your extremism. We accept full blame.""OMG, how many people do we have to kill around here to finally get our message across?"

Its insulting and idiotic. They claim some Muslim clerics condemn these actions and people, but then some cheer, support, and encourage it (more than the few that condemn it, from what I've seen). They claim that the Koran condemns this kind of behavior, and it does. But the Koran also supports and encourages it.

And what's more, the Hadith and the later teachings of Muslim scholars support and encourage these evil acts. And unlike Protestant Christianity, Islam teaches that the Koran is not the exclusive and complete word of God, but that later teachings add to and expand Islam. Those statements by Sharia Court clerics aren't just legal statements, they become part of official Muslim doctrine, they are Islamic religion now.

So why do the left insist on this idiotic, vapid, and unsupportable nonsense? Why repeat this lie? Well, I believe there's a variety of reasons

First, they are more afraid and concerned about backlash and reprisals against Muslims than they are the actual terrorist attacks. They're so afraid that stupid knuckle-dragging right wingers are going to start lynching Muslims that they feel the need to make this defenseless lie about their true state of faith.

Second, they are afraid of being racist, or seeming racist, which in their somewhat lunatic mindset, opposing Islam becomes. For them, Islam is another race, or at least represents people of another race, so that opposition to it becomes racism. And that's the ultimate sin to a leftist, who wants to be seen as the good guy in the room as opposed to all of you people.

Third, they are worried that admitting and condemning Muslim radicalism means support for war, and they are using the Drum Principle in which you recognize evil but do not condemn it because that might be used for support of something you don't like. So they condemn terrorism but make sure its in a way that can't be used to take any actual tangible action (other than something absurd like gun control - given that Paris has heavy gun control and all the weapons used were already illegal).

Fourth, they tend to view Muslims as an oppressed "other" minority, who only do bad things because they are cruelly abused by the oppressor (white male Europeans), and must be defended against this cruelty. By declaring the bad guys un-Muslim, then they are not part of the group that must be protected.

Fifth, they're playing for the team. They step back, see who is cheering for what, and go with that. The right condemns Muslim radicalism? Well then that must be incorrect, because everything the other team does and says is necessarily wrong.
Sixth, the left feels that if they deny bad guys are Muslim, they are supporting who they view as "moderate" Muslims that claim the same thing, and think this lends legitimacy to the claim as well as moral support and encouragement to the good guys.

Finally, the left relies on Muslim immigration for votes and support for their plans to undermine and destroy capitalism, the given culture, traditions, and past of a nation, to clear the way for their golden utopian schemes. So they need to pander to Muslims and protect them for the votes.

So you get this stupid, insane line about Muslims not being actual Muslims. After all, they're only brown people and we on the left know better than they do what they think.

Monday, November 09, 2015

SCREWTAPE PROPOSES A TOAST

C.S. Lewis' Screwtape Letters, published in 1942 is a fictitious series of letters between a young demon attempting to tempt a target, and an older, more experienced demon. The letters are written from the perspective of the bad guys, referring to God as "the enemy" and the device was very effective at getting subtle and powerful concepts across in a creative way.

At the end of the book is this extended segment, which is a speech given by the now-skilled Screwtape, to all of the assembled graduating demons. And it is chillingly appropriate to our day and culture.

It is customary on these occasions for the speaker to address himself chiefly to those among you who have just graduated and who will very soon be posted to official Tempterships on Earth. It is a custom I willingly obey. I well remember with what trepidation I awaited my own first appointment. I hope, and believe, that each one of you has the same uneasiness tonight. Your career is before you. Hell expects and demands that it should be — as mine was — one of unbroken success. If it is not, you know what awaits you.

I have no wish to reduce the wholesome and realistic element of terror, the unremitting anxiety, which must act as the lash and spur to your endeavours. How often you will envy the humans their faculty of sleep! Yet at the same time I would wish to put before you a moderately encouraging view of the strategical situation as a whole.

Your dreaded Principal has included in a speech full of points something like an apology for the banquet which he has set before us. Well, gentledevils, no one blames him. But it would be in vain to deny that the human souls on whose anguish we have been feasting tonight were of pretty poor quality. Not all the most skillful cookery of our tormentors could make them better than insipid.

Oh, to get one’s teeth again into a Farinata, a Henry VIII, or even a Hitler! There was real crackling there; something to crunch; a rage, an egotism, a cruelty only just less robust than our own. It put up a delicious resistance to being devoured. It warmed your inwards when you’d got it down.

Instead of this, what have we had tonight? There was a municipal authority with Graft sauce. But personally I could not detect in him the flavour of a really passionate and brutal avarice such as delighted one in the great tycoons of the last century. Was he not unmistakably a Little Man — a creature of the petty rake-off pocketed with a petty joke in private and denied with the stalest platitudes in his public utterances — a grubby little nonentity who had drifted into corruption, only just realizing that he was corrupt, and chiefly because everyone else did it? Then there was the lukewarm Casserole of Adulterers. Could you find in it any trace of a fully inflamed, defiant, rebellious, insatiable lust? I couldn’t. They all tasted to me like undersexed morons who had blundered or trickled into the wrong beds in automatic response to sexy advertisements, or to make themselves feel modern and emancipated, or to reassure themselves about their virility or their “normalcy,” or even because they had nothing else to do. Frankly, to me who have tasted Messalina and Cassanova, they were nauseating. The Trade Unionist stuffed with sedition was perhaps a shade better. He had done some real harm. He had, not quite unknowingly, worked for bloodshed, famine, and the extinction of liberty. Yes, in a way. But what a way! He thought of those ultimate objectives so little. Toeing the party line, self-importance, and above all mere routine, were what really dominated his life.

But now comes the point. Gastronomically, all this is deplorable. But I hope none of us puts gastronomy first. Is it not, in another and far more serious way, full of hope and promise?

Consider, first, the mere quantity. The quality may be wretched; but we never had souls (of a sort) in more abundance.

And then the triumph. We are tempted to say that such souls — or such residual puddles of what once was soul — are hardly worth damning. Yes, but the Enemy (for whatever inscrutable and perverse reason) thought them worth trying to save. Believe me, He did. You youngsters who have not yet been on active duty have no idea with what labour, with what delicate skill, each of these miserable creatures was finally captured.

The difficulty lay in their very smallness and flabbiness. Here were vermin so muddled in mind, so passively responsive to environment, that it was very hard to raise them to that level of clarity and deliberateness at which mortal sin becomes possible. To raise them just enough; but not that fatal millimetre of “too much.” For then, of course, all would possibly have been lost. They might have seen; they might have repented. On the other hand, if they had been raised too little, they would very possibly have qualified for Limbo, as creatures suitable neither for Heaven nor for Hell; things that, having failed to make the grade, are allowed to sink into a more or less contented subhumanity forever.

In each individual choice of what the Enemy would call the “wrong” turning, such creatures are at first hardly, if at all, in a state of full spiritual responsibility. They do not understand either the source or the real character of the prohibitions they are breaking. Their consciousness hardly exists apart from the social atmosphere that surrounds them. And of course we have contrived that their very language should be all smudge and blur; what would be a bribe in someone else’s profession is a tip or a present in theirs. The job of their Tempters was first, or course, to harden these choices of the Hellward roads into a habit by steady repetition. But then (and this was all-important) to turn the habit into a principle — a principle the creature is prepared to defend. After that, all will go well. Conformity to the social environment, at first merely instinctive or even mechanical — how should a jelly not conform? — now becomes an unacknowledged creed or ideal of Togetherness or Being Like Folks. Mere ignorance of the law they break now turns into a vague theory about it — remember, they know no history — a theory expressed by calling it conventional or Puritan or bourgeois “morality.” Thus gradually there comes to exist at the center of the creature a hard, tight, settled core of resolution to go on being what it is, and even to resist moods that might tend to alter it. It is a very small core; not at all reflective (they are too ignorant) nor defiant (their emotional and imaginative poverty excludes that); almost, in its own way, prim and demure; like a pebble, or a very young cancer. But it will serve our turn. Here at last is a real and deliberate, though not fully articulate, rejection of what the Enemy calls Grace.

These, then, are two welcome phenomena. First, the abundance of our captures: however tasteless our fare, we are in no danger of famine. And secondly, the triumph: the skill of our Tempters has never stood higher. But the third moral, which I have not yet drawn, is the most important of all.

The sort of souls on whose despair and ruin we have — well, I won’t say feasted, but at any rate subsisted — tonight are increasing in numbers and will continue to increase. Our advices from Lower Command assure us that this is so; our directives warn us to orient all our tactics in view of this situation. The “great” sinners, those in whom vivid and genial passions have been pushed beyond the bounds and in whom an immense concentration of will has been devoted to objects which the Enemy abhors, will not disappear. But they will grow rarer. Our catches will be ever more numerous; but they will consist increasingly of trash — trash which we should once have thrown to Cerberus and the hellhounds as unfit for diabolical consumption. And there are two things I want you to understand about this: First, that however depressing it might seem, it is really a change for the better. And secondly, I would draw your attention to the means by which it has been brought about.

It is a change for the better. The great (and toothsome) sinners are made out of the very same material as those horrible phenomena the great Saints. The virtual disappearance of such material may mean insipid meals for us. But is it not utter frustration and famine for the Enemy? He did not create the humans — He did not become one of them and die among them by torture — in order to produce candidates for Limbo, “failed” humans. He wanted to make them Saints; gods; things like Himself. Is the dullness of your present fare not a very small price to pay for the delicious knowledge that His whole great experiment is petering out? But not only that. As the great sinners grow fewer, and the majority lose all individuality, the great sinners become far more effective agents for us. Every dictator or even demagogue — almost every film star or [rock star] — can now draw tens of thousands of the human sheep with him. They give themselves (what there is of them) to him; in him, to us. There may come a time when we shall have no need to bother about individual temptation at all, except for the few. Catch the bellwether, and his whole flock comes after him.